Outsmarted by a rat?

My childhood fascination with traps resurfaced recently, and had me wondering if I'm even as smart as a rat I had a recent run in with!
It's not like my interest in traps has led me to curate a trap museum or anything like that, but I've always admired the elegant simplicity of the ways people have found to catch things.
Especially if they involve trip wires, or teetering foot plates that send doors swinging shut and all that sort of thing.

Of course I'm not saying I like what a lot of traps do to things, it's just the ingeniousness of the designs and mechanisms which for some reason always caught my interest.

Well anyway, I caught a rat in the back yard with a Havahart live trap. It only catches one critter at a time (unlike the mouse trap we used to catch the fiendish paint-eating mouse in the car), but it has the whole footplate/doors snapping shut stuff going for it!

I don't know what kind it is, although I suspect it might be a pack rat, but as you can see it's very cute with its light belly and black beady eyes.

 Here it is next to Sprightly my hoodrat.

So after driving it a couple of miles away I let it out.

It ran straight under my car.
I peered underneath just in time to see it climbing up the inside of my front wheel.
Damn.

I started the engine, hoping to scare it off. I didn't see it run away, so after a minute I started to drive home anyway.
I was expecting to see a furry face come poking out through an air vent, or magically appear by my foot pedals at any moment.

My driving was a bit nervous and quite slow, just in case I had to contend with a furry companion running up my trouser leg.

There was no sign of it under the hood when I got back, so did it hitch a ride home, or not?

A couple of days later I caught an identical rat and released it (a bit further from the car!) in the same place as before.
I figured if it was a buddy of the first one, they could hang out.
Or it could have been the same one.

It may just be viewing recent events as bit of an annoyance: 'Oh, not THIS again', sort of thing.

Well this time at least I made sure it went away from the road, so I could drive home relaxed!

Besides that, I'm excited to announce that my Sumo Wrestling Toads will be on display in San Diego as part of the Society of Animal Artists 50th annual show, called 'Art and the Animal'.
And who knows, maybe they'll be selected for the following museum tour?

Last up, see if you can spot the critter lurking in this picture (I'll show it close up in my next post!)

Click these links to visit my website... SteveWorthingtonArt.com - Sculpture that loves you back
or my Etsy store, CritterVille
Still no news since my post regarding ......of........ Galleries who still owes me for bronze sales made around the new year. (Edit-issue resolved after 1 yr thanks to Goldman, Evans and Trammell)

Sprightly mouse hood ornament - The hoodrat rides!

Ohh, the excitement...! My hoodrat has arrived...
Just got to take care of the patina...
Some enamel paint on the base...
Bingo! Finally installed onto the El Camino via some bolts which go through the hood and some big old metal washers and hefty nuts underneath.
Sprightly can fearlessly zip all around Santa Fe with a firm grip on the hood!'Wwwhhhheeeeeee!!!!!!'
Thanks again Miles (a top choice if you need any small stuff cast), nice job! I love my Sprightly mouse hoodrat!

Hoodrats, Darth Vader, and the tree snake of death!

Time for the next exciting installment of Sprightly the hood ornament for my car...
Well, in our last thrilling episode I mailed off a wax piece (as seen above) to Miles.

True to form, thrilling installment wise, it changed color and now appears pink!
Actually Miles made a mold of it since he was toying with the idea of doing a nickel plated one, so he'd need to be able to use it more than once. Since it's lost wax casting, if your original is wax, and you cast it, you lose it!
Darth Vader showed up and had to choke Miles into giving up the mouse, using only the power of his mind. As that pesky Darth is apt to do.
Favoring the dark side, Darth proceeded to waterboard poor Sprightly into revealing anything he might know about cheese, with particular reference to its potential uses as a chemical or biological weapon.

Darth is a shadow of his former self, taking on part time mouse torturing jobs between terrorizing whole planets of actual people these days. Seems Wall Street has had an intergalactic reach.
It's the silver sniffer! Now it just needs boxing up and sending to me for its next round of transformations...
Speaking of sniffing, this bird and nest were snapped outside our window a few days ago. Not sure what bird it is, but it was making a racket so I thought I'd see what was up.
And that brings us to the sniffing part.
A bull snake was up the tree having a nose about, making the bird very agitated.
I watch animal planet, so I know that snakes are deaf.
The bird is too busy hunting about for food to be bothered with tv, so it didn't realize it was wasting its energy in vocal protests at the snake.

The snake is kind of a pet of sorts, in so much as it seems to live in our garden (we spot it once or twice a year), and I like snakes.
Anyhow, since we also liked the idea of seeing baby birds growing up I popped outside and tried to get the snake down with a putter, but it shot straight up into the very spindly branches.
Really fast. I was a bit stunned.

The long pole for changing light bulbs too high to reach did the job, directing him down until I could grab him and drop him on the floor, where he slid under a pile of brush.

A day later the bird had left the nest, and after peeking a look inside via a makeup mirror taped to a stick there were no eggs either. So I guess the slithery fiend returned to claim his meal. Easier to catch than mice I suppose.